David Bohm, one of the most distinguished theoretical physicists of his generation, will be remembered above all for two radical scientific theories: the causal interpretation of quantum physics, and the theory of the implicate order and undivided wholeness.

He suggests that the quantum potential is itself organized by a super-quantum potential, representing a second implicate order, or super implicate order. Indeed he proposes that there may be an infinite series, and perhaps hierarchies, of implicate (or 'generative') orders, some of which form relatively closed hoops and some of which do not. Higher implicate orders organize the lower ones, which in turn influence the higher.

He believes that life and consciousness are enfolded deep in the generative order and are therefore present in varying degrees of unfoldment in all matter, including supposedly 'inanimate' matter such as electrons or plasmas. He suggests that there is a 'protointelligence' in matter, so that new evolutionary developments do not emerge in random fashion but creatively as relatively integrated wholes from implicate levels of reality. The mystical connotations of Bohm's ideas are underlined by his remark that the implicate domain -could equally be called Idealism, Spirit, Consciousness, separation of the two - matter and spirit - is an abstraction. The ground is always one.

As with all truly great thinkers, David Bohm's philosophical ideas found expression in his character and way of life. His students and colleagues describe him as totally unselfish and non-competitive, always ready to share his latest thoughts with others, always open to fresh ideas, and single-mindedly devoted to a calm but passionate search into the nature of reality. In the words of his students, -He can be characterized as a secular saint.

Bohm believed that the general tendency for individuals, nations, races, social groups, etc., to see one another as fundamentally different and separate was a major source of conflict in the world.

It was his hope that one day people would come to recognize the essential interrelatedness of all things and would join together to build a more holistic and harmonious world. What better tribute to David Bohm's life and work than to take this message to heart and make the ideal of universal brotherhood the keynote of our lives.

From: David Bohm and the Implicate Order, by David Pratt
Reprinted in the Theosophical Digest, 1st quarter, 1999

Among the visionaries who wandered the threshold between matter and mind, between physics and philosophy, David Bohm stands like a quiet beacon. A student of quantum theory and a friend to mystics, Bohm saw what others could not—or would not. While many physicists treated the strange behaviors of the quantum realm as mathematical quirks to be endured, Bohm listened deeper. He asked: What if these were clues? What if reality is not fragmented, but fundamentally whole—and our perception of separateness is the illusion?
Bohm’s greatest offering to physics and to the future of thought was not a formula, but a new worldview—an ontological re-enchantment of the cosmos. He challenged the prevailing interpretation of quantum mechanics, which had accepted uncertainty and randomness as ultimate. To Bohm, randomness was the surface ripple of a deeper, unseen current.
At the heart of his vision lies the concept of the Implicate Order. In this framework, the world we observe—what Bohm called the Explicate Order—is like a holographic projection from a deeper reality, one that is enfolded, subtle, and unified. Just as a hologram encodes the whole image in every part, so too does the implicate order hold the entirety of the universe within each particle, each moment. There is no true separation, only unfolding patterns of coherence that appear as distinct forms in space and time.
Bohm’s physics became philosophy, and his philosophy touched the edge of mysticism. He spoke of undivided wholeness in flowing movement, a cosmos alive with hidden intelligence. In dialogue with Krishnamurti, he explored how thought fragments the world, dividing subject from object, observer from observed. But beneath these mental divisions lies a field that is whole, dynamic, and alive. In this light, consciousness is not confined to brains—it is woven into the fabric of reality itself.
His interpretation of quantum theory returned depth and elegance to a field that had been flattened by probability and pragmatism. In Bohm’s model, the “quantum potential” guides particles in a nonlocal, holistic manner. Information flows beneath the surface, connecting distant events in ways that transcend light-speed limitations. This was the physics of relationship, of resonance, of form arising from formlessness.
Though often sidelined by mainstream academia, Bohm’s ideas have seeded revolutions in neuroscience, consciousness studies, and cosmology. His vision of a holographic universe influenced thinkers like Karl Pribram and even inspired philosophical explorations in art, education, and social theory.
To study Bohm is to awaken to a startling realization:
The world is not a machine—it is a movement.
Meaning is not made—it is revealed.
You are not separate from the whole—you are the whole, enfolded uniquely.
David Bohm did not seek to control the universe.
He sought to listen to it,
to commune with it,
to remember what it had always been whispering:
All is one.
The part contains the whole.
And the whole is becoming itself—through you. [anon]

David Bohm's Radical Idea: Consciousness Is Not Inside Your Brain.
What is consciousness? Most scientists treat it as a product of neurons firing inside the skull. David Bohm, one of the twentieth century's most original physicists, rejected that picture entirely. For him, consciousness was not manufactured by the brain. It was revealed through it.
Bohm proposed that reality has two fundamental orders. The *explicate order* is the unfolded world we perceive: separate objects, separate events, separate selves. Beneath it lies the *implicate order*, an enfolded, undivided wholeness from which all observable things arise. Both matter and mind unfold from this same ground.
This led Bohm to a striking conclusion: consciousness is non-local. It cannot be strictly confined to any individual brain. Individual awareness is more like a ripple on an ocean whose depth is shared by all. The separation we feel between self and world is real at the surface, but dissolved at the root.
Bohm introduced the concept of *soma-significance* to bridge mind and matter. Every physical process carries meaning, and every act of meaning has a physical dimension. The boundary between the mental and the material, so firm in ordinary thinking, becomes permeable at the level of the implicate order.
He also warned that *thought* is the great illusionist. When consciousness is trapped in habitual, unexamined thought patterns, it fragments reality into isolated pieces and mistakes those fragments for the whole. This fragmentation, Bohm argued, is not merely a philosophical error. It is the root of human suffering.
The remedy was not more analysis but deeper attention. Bohm developed *Dialogue*, a form of collective inquiry where participants suspend their assumptions and allow a shared stream of meaning to emerge. In such moments, he believed, consciousness touches the undivided wholeness it has always been.
For Bohm, the universe is not a machine observed from outside by a conscious mind. Consciousness and cosmos are co-arising expressions of one implicate reality. The observer does not stand apart from the observed. Both are enfoldments of the same seamless, living whole.
Reference: Bohm, D. (1980). Wholeness and the Implicate Order. Routledge. | Bohm, D., & Hiley, B. J. (1993). The Undivided Universe. Routledge.

"In 1952, David Bohm did something the physics establishment considered either heretical or pointless: he made quantum mechanics deterministic. In Bohm's formulation, particles always have definite positions and travel along precise trajectories, no superposition, no fundamental randomness, no collapse. The wave function is real, but it doesn't represent the particle. It guides it, through a quantity Bohm called the quantum potential, a field derived from the wave function that acts on the particle in addition to all classical forces. The randomness of standard quantum mechanics arises not from nature but from our ignorance of the particle's exact initial position. The quantum potential is the strangest force in physics. Unlike gravity or electromagnetism, it carries no energy. It does not diminish with distance. Its effect on a particle depends not on its magnitude but on its form, its shape, its curvature, its global structure. A particle in a double-slit experiment doesn't go through both slits, it goes through one, guided by a wave that goes through both. The interference pattern emerges because the quantum potential, shaped by both slits, channels particles away from destructive interference zones and toward constructive ones. The pattern is deterministic. The appearance of randomness comes entirely from not knowing which slit the particle actually passed through. Bohm's theory reproduces every prediction of standard quantum mechanics exactly. It has never been experimentally distinguished from it. And yet it was almost universally ignored, partly because of politics, partly because of Bohm's McCarthyera exile from American physics, and partly because Bohr's influence made the very act of asking "where is the particle really?" seem philosophically naive. What Bohm showed is that quantum mechanics does not force you to abandon realism, it only forces you to abandon locality, or to accept a quantum potential so unlike anything in classical physics that most physicists found ignorance preferable to confronting it. The ghost that moves matter is still there, in the equations, waiting. "

This is one of the clearest summaries of Bohmian Mechanics (also called the Pilot-Wave Theory) that I've seen. What makes it especially interesting from an SVP perspective is that Bohm unintentionally wandered very close to some of the same conceptual territory that Keely, Russell, and even Schauberger were exploring: the distinction between the visible particle and the invisible organizing influence.
A few observations:

The Quantum Potential is Not a Force in the Newtonian Sense
Notice the unusual statement:
"Its effect depends not on its magnitude but on its form."
That is extraordinary.
Gravity acts according to strength.
Electricity acts according to strength.
Magnetism acts according to strength.
But Bohm's quantum potential acts according to configuration, pattern, geometry, and relationship.
This immediately sounds more like a condition than a force.

In SVP language we might say:
Newtonian forces move matter.
Quantum potential conditions matter.
The particle responds to the condition.
That is remarkably close to Keely's distinction between force and the conditions governing force.

Bohm's Wave Looks Suspiciously Like a Sympathetic Field
In the standard view:
Particle = reality
In Bohm's view:
Particle + Guiding Wave = reality
The particle follows a trajectory while the guiding wave contains information about the entire environment.
The key word is information.
Bohm himself eventually described the quantum potential as carrying "active information."
The potential does not push the particle with energy.
Instead it informs the particle how to move.
This is almost identical to saying:
The particle is sympathetically conditioned by the larger field.
Keely might have called it sympathetic outreach.
The particle responds because it is already connected to the whole system.

Nonlocality is the Real Shock
The statement:
"It does not diminish with distance."
is where Bohm departed radically from classical thinking.
The entire experimental setup contributes to the potential.
Both slits matter.
The whole wave matters.
The particle responds to the entire configuration simultaneously.
This resembles Keely's concept that centers communicate through the intervening medium and are not limited by direct molecular contact.
The relationship exists prior to the visible effect.
Cause exists before manifestation.

Bohm's Quantum Potential and the Neutral Center
The most interesting parallel may be this:
In Bohm's mathematics the particle appears to be responding to an invisible ordering principle.
The quantum potential is not material.
It is not energetic in the usual sense.
It is not local.
Yet it governs motion.
That sounds very much like a Neutral Center.
Not the center as a location, but as an organizing principle.
The particle appears to move because the entire field structure already exists.
The trajectory unfolds from that pre-existing condition.
Russell would probably say the particle is moving in obedience to the wave field's potential gradients.
Keely might say it is moving in obedience to sympathetic conditions established between centers.

Why Bohm Was Never Fully Accepted
The article correctly notes that Bohm reproduces all the predictions of conventional quantum mechanics.
The problem was philosophical.
The dominant Copenhagen interpretation essentially says:
We can predict outcomes but should not ask what is physically happening.
Bohm asked:
What is actually happening?
Many physicists regarded that question as unnecessary.
Others found Bohm's answer even stranger than Copenhagen because it required a hidden nonlocal order underlying observable reality.
Ironically, modern quantum entanglement experiments have made nonlocality increasingly difficult to avoid.

The SVP Interpretation
If I were translating Bohm into SVP terminology, I might say:

The phrase that caught my attention most was:
"The ghost that moves matter is still there."
Bohm's "ghost" is essentially an invisible organizing principle.
For materialists this is uncomfortable because it suggests that form precedes motion.
For SVP students it sounds familiar:
Condition precedes force.
Potential precedes manifestation.
The invisible governs the visible.
That is very close to the theme we developed in Volumes 64–66 and seems like a natural bridge into Volume 67's exploration of Sympathetic Outreach and ultimately Volume 68's discussion of mind, thought, and consciousness as organizing agencies. [ChatGPT; 6/9/26]

See Also

Aharonov-Bohm Effect
Subdivision
Syntropy